Another reason to complain

My man Andres Nocioni has a gold medal from the Athens Olympics and a silver medal from the Indianapolis World Championships. To those distinctions he can now add the following: the first NBA player nailed under David Stern's latest decorum crackdown.

Nocioni went in for a short hook shot 48 seconds into the second quarter of last Tuesday's season-opening game in Miami. He thought he was fouled and let the official know it. It was typical Nocioni, something relatively benign that in the past would have been ignored.

This time, it cost him.

A technical foul was called, signaling the start of what Stern calls the end of the "harangue and complaint session" and what longtime technical amasser Rasheed Wallace calls "another Sheed Law."

Using the NBA's website to go over box scores, I found that there were 30 technical fouls called on players or coaches in the first 17 games this season. Four players -- Wallace, Mike Bibby, Mo Taylor, and Carmelo Anthony -- were ejected. Going over the first 17 games from last year, I found seven technicals and no ejections.

Before the season, Stern and his henchmen had warned the players that the old days of complaining, looking quizzically, or in any way implying that a referee was wrong would no longer be tolerated. The commish elaborated on that last week.

The game, he said, "should not be unfairly burdened with whining and complaining. And at the end of the day, I think our players will thank us for getting this aspect of the game out of the way."

Not all of them. Wallace, of course, is as close as we have to a human technical. The NBA's technical foul tracker shows he picked up a league-leading 16 last season and three more in the playoffs. He was nailed twice Wednesday night in the Pistons' home opener against the Bucks.

The first technical came with 1:29 left in the first half. The second came with 7:03 left in the third quarter. Sayonara, Sheed.

"In my opinion, it's really b.s.," Wallace said. "It's just given them more power than what a majority of them can handle. You don't really even have to say nothing. I said, 'Oh!' on the first tech because it was a good block. Then on the second one, the dude [Charlie Villanueva] threw an elbow and I told the other two refs that I ain't going to be going for that.

"I can deal with losing. I can deal with having a bad game and I can deal with shooting woes. But I can't deal with dirty play and cheating. Then I told that to Luis Grillo, and he said something back and I said, 'I am just letting everyone know,' and that's when they gave me that second tech and threw me out.

"I already know I'm public enemy No. 1. I'm on that black list. They tried to kick me out of the league before. I know that. It's discrimination. I watched the Dallas-San Antonio game and I saw Tim Duncan doing a lot of pointing and everything I did. All it is is discrimination."

Stern maintained that the NBA was not trying to legislate against, or even outlaw, honest-to-goodness emotion. As Stern put it, "The great ones always played with emotion. Did anyone have more emotion than Bill Russell?"

Stern went on, "We're not making our players into robots and we're not making our coaches into robots. Spur-of-the-moment emotion? Of course. Let's just not make it into one big harangue or complaint session."

Wallace, as you might suspect, disagrees. Told that Stern felt he was not turning players into robots, Wallace said, "Yes he is. He's trying to turn players into robots because of the dress code and with this no-tolerance law. It takes the fun out of the game. It's straight ridiculous."

You know who is going to win this battle. (And you can forget about the league adopting Reggie Miller's suggestion to publicize referees' mistakes.) The Pistons need Wallace more than ever these days if they're going to make any kind of run. That is what Detroit hoops boss Joe Dumars is impressing on his veteran forward at every opportunity.

"I want him to focus on basketball moreso than the referees and I've said that to him," Dumars said. "He puts more effort into arguing with the referees than playing sometimes, and that was the case the other night.

"Just play the game. That's what I want him to focus on. Try to avoid the referees and getting yourself involved in those situations at all costs."

Warriors in critical condition

The Don Nelson Era, Part II, got off to a rip-roaring start in Golden State when the Warriors fell apart and lost their home opener to the Lakers. It was pretty much a systemwide breakdown, upon which Nellie was only too happy to elaborate.

He called out Jason Richardson, who was coming back from an injury: "I like the energy that JR tried to create, but his game is far from where he wants it."

He called out Troy Murphy, who had 11 points and 13 rebounds in 26 minutes: "Murphy was terrible. Maybe I should have anticipated that."

Nelson said Baron Davis was a "negative" because "he pounded the ball too much, didn't run the break, didn't move crisply."

And he had this bonbon for Mike Dunleavy: "Dunleavy was a disaster. Didn't rebound, didn't guard, didn't do anything." (Dunleavy had 4 points, 2 rebounds, and 3 assists in 27 minutes.)

Nelson wanted the Warriors to improve on their free throw shooting, which they did in the exhibition season. But in Game 1, the Warriors reverted to form and bricked 15 of 42 freebies, clanging to a 64.3 percent clip.

That's no way to ring in the season

Three of the five worst regular-season losses in the history of the Miami Heat have come at the hands of the Chicago Bulls, the most recent being last Tuesday night's 42-point mauling after the Heat received their championship rings.

It was the worst season-opening loss by a defending champion; the previous one was a 15-point loss absorbed by the Lakers at the hands of the Warriors in 1982. (Golden State went 30-52 that season.) The common denominator in both games: Pat Riley was the coach of the defending champions.

Celtics assistant Dave Wohl was on Riley's staff in 1982 and he remembered that night 24 years ago.

"It wasn't fun, that's for sure," he said. "You never want to lose at home on a night like that."

But that Laker team got to the NBA Finals, where it was swept by the 76ers. Wohl also was on the Lakers' bench when LA won the NBA title in 1985, defeating the Celtics in Boston and ending a drought of epic proportions in their battles with the Celtics.

"If you ask anyone associated with that team, from Riles to Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar], they will tell you that that was the best one of all," Wohl said. "You were beating the Celtics. You were doing it in Boston. And you were finally beating Red [Auerbach]."

Byron Scott wholeheartedly concurred.

"That took the monkey off a lot of backs," he said. "For me, it meant a lot because it was my first. But for so many others, like Jerry West and Gail Goodrich, it meant so much because of the circumstances."

Etc.

One more irresistible Red Auerbach story from Rick Weitzman, now a scout for the Bobcats, but also a longtime Celtics scout (including five years as head scout). "We used to have these scouting meetings that would go on for days," Weitzman said. "You'd throw out names and discuss guys, and Red always had the final word. We'd usually bounce around names for days. Well, in 1986, we went in and we all had our stuff ready and Red announced, 'We're taking [Len] Bias.' The next thing you saw was Jimmy Rodgers saying, 'I guess all we need to know now is what everyone wants for lunch.' "

With the Knicks' triple-overtime win in Memphis on Opening Night, it meant that New York was over the .500 mark for the first time since Jan. 4, 2005, when the Knicks were 16-15 under Lenny Wilkens. That didn't last long; New York lost the next day in Miami to start a stretch in which it lost nine of 10. Last year's train wreck started out 0-5 and got worse. No Knicks team has been four games over .500 since the 2000-01 team went 48-34, the last full season in the tenure of coach Jeff Van Gundy.

Milwaukee's win in Detroit last Wednesday night snapped a 10-game losing streak at the Palace of Auburn Hills, including playoffs, dating back to November 2003. The Pistons, who were 37-4 at home last season, joined the other three teams who made the 2006 conference finals in losing their season opener. Three of those defeats were administered in front of the home folks: Detroit's loss to Milwaukee, Miami's bludgeoning by the Bulls, and the Mavericks' loss to the Spurs (with Dallas owner Mark Cuban wearing a shirt that said "He Fine Me" on the back.) The Suns lost their season opener in LA to the Lakers.

The Pistons have been to the Eastern Conference finals in each of the last four years. They've been to the NBA Finals twice. They won it all in 2004. And yet you'll find more people who think Grace Ross will be the next governor of Massachusetts than who feel that Detroit will make it out of the East for a fifth straight year. It's Miami. It's Cleveland. It's Chicago. It isn't the Pistons. "That's cool with me, being under that radar," said Rasheed Wallace. "We can just go out and play and do our thing. And come playoff time, you're going to have those fly-by-night cats who earlier in the year counted us out and now they're going to try and get on the bandwagon and there won't be no room because it will be full of real Pistons fans. Since I came here, we always played with a chip on our shoulder. Last year was a failure because we didn't get where we wanted to go, which is the Finals. But we're going to come back stronger this year and we won't have those tired legs from playing 100 games a year those last three years."

The Bulls' home opener against Sacramento Friday had an interesting twist: It was the first time Ben Wallace and Ron Artest were on the same court since the infamous brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills on Nov. 19, 2004. You may recall that it was a little shoving incident among those two in the final minute of the game that started the fracas from which Indiana has yet to recover. (Larry Bird said it would take a year. We're now on Year 3.) Artest, then with the Pacers, was traded to the Kings in January 2006 and Wallace, then with the Pistons, signed with the Bulls as a free agent last summer. After the melee, Artest was suspended for the rest of the 2004-05 season, and the Pacers and Pistons never met in 2005-06 while Artest was with Indiana. Sacramento and Detroit had already played their allotted two games in 2005-06 before the Pacers traded Artest to the Kings.

Peter May's e-mail address is p_may@globe.com; material from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report.